Whenever expensive items are involved, security is always a major concern. If you‘ve fulfilled a childhood dream of owning your own large boat, you would prefer to keep it safe from theft and vandalism, even when you‘re not there to keep an eye on it yourself. This explains why Herrington Harbor North Marina in Maryland had Basler network cameras installed to protect their grounds and everything on them.
Whenever expensive items are involved, security is always a major concern. If you‘ve fulfilled a childhood dream of owning your own large boat, you would prefer to keep it safe from theft and vandalism, even when you‘re not there to keep an eye on it yourself. This explains why Herrington Harbor North Marina in Maryland had Basler network cameras installed to protect their grounds and everything on them.
Customer
● Herrington Harbor North
● Location: Tracy‘s Landing, Maryland, the U.S.
● Industry: Leisure
● Completed: 2010
● Integration Partner: Surveillance Secure
The two Herrington Harbor Marinas – Herrington Harbor North and Herrington Harbor South were established in 1978 from what was formerly known as the Rose Haven Yacht Club. With their 1,200 boat slips, the two resorts form the largest marina on the Maryland shore of the Chesapeake Bay. These ecolifestyle marina resorts provide the closest deepwater access to the bay from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Herrington Harbor North is located at the former Forces of Nature Harbor in Deale and can accommodate up to 1,500 boats on land.
With millions of dollars worth of boats on the marina property Herrington Harbor North needed a secure, reliable and durable video surveillance solution for crime prevention. One of the main requirements for the surveillance cameras was that they should provide clear images so that people‘s faces and the license plates of cars driving through the parking lots could be recognized – both during the day and at night. Another prerequisite was the storage of video footage for six months.
Solution and Benefits
With these demanding requirements concerning image quality defined, a comparison of analog and digital cameras proved that a digital surveillance camera system was the only logical choice.
After some disappointing experiences with a competitor's camera, Herrington Harbor North decided to use nine Basler cameras because they offer excellent image quality and true day/night capability. Basler day/night network cameras are equipped with an automatically retractable IR-cut filter. This means that they use a mechanism which places an IR-cut filter in front of the sensor in day mode and removes the filter in night mode. The retractable filter allows the camera to properly represent colors using the visible light available during the daytime and to produce high-quality black and white images when there is only IR light available at night. These characteristics made the Basler ideal for surveillance of the large marina area even with minimal lighting.
With the camera's megapixel resolution, image details such as faces and license plates can easily be distinguished. In case a crime such as property damage is committed, this wealth of detail facilitates identification of the criminals. In addition, the cameras have a built-in motion detection feature. When motion is detected, an alarm can be issued to the system operator via E-mail, FTP, HTTP or an electrical output signal. An individual “alarm buffer” can be enabled on each of the video streams transmitted by the camera, and each buffer can store several seconds of video. An alarm buffer can be set up so that images are captured and stored both a few seconds before and a few seconds after an alarm event is detected. This means that an operator can play back the buffer and easily see what triggered an alarm event.